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Common People

Leonora Kathleen Green
(1901—1966)

Leonora Kathleen Green (1901-1966), "Crossroads from My Window", 1932 (ArtUK/BAC Moving Museum: Wandsworth Collection).

This scene in Clapham Junction (at the lowest point of Battersea Rise, with Northcote Rd to the right and St John's Rd left) would have been well-known to PHJ. Pamela Hansford Johnson's home, at 53 Battersea Rise, was roughly the last house in view top left of the picture.

[Jeanne Rathbone: Pamela Hansford Johnson.]

The pub on the right was the Northcote Tavern (2020: "The Northcote" - see PubWiki: Link). The publican and barman in 1881 are Spencer and Charles Chaplin - said to be close relatives of Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin - better known as Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977).

PHJ writes somewhere about the coming of traffic lights - was she referring to ones installed at this junction? And dwells on a really dismal local pub - the Northcote?

A similar view in 2020.

(Click on images to enlarge)

I would love to know more about Leonora Green, who was about 21 when she painted this picture. Two more paintings - from WWII, both in the Imperial War Museum - can be see on the ArtUK website here. Other than that, I've found nothing. I'm sure I've seen references to her as an RA, so they would have more about her? However, she is not shown in their lists - perhaps she showed at e.g. a Summer Exhibition? A web search has failed to bring up very much at all:

"Coupons required" (1941)

"Lest we forget" (1945)

(Imperial War Museum)

(The paintings were gifted by Mrs D M Moore in the 1980s. Presumably the IWM has more info about LG and DMM?)

(Click on image to enlarge)

ArtBiogs says:

GREEN Leonora Kathleen 1901-1966: Painter new Silver [meaning? Ah, Invaluable says her alias was Leonora Kathleen Silver [https://www.invaluable.com/artist/green-leonora-kathleen-18ouy5ik1s/] in Battersea, London the daughter of a piano tuner and repairer. She attended Camberwell School of Art during the early 1920s and is known to have exhibited at the Royal Academy.

[Source: Link.]

This is a precis: ArtBiogs may have more info, but there is a charge. Surely she was too young to have attended Camberwell "in the early 1920s"?

Leonora Green's home: 70 Battersea Rise

Leonora Green's home - 70 Battersea Rise - above what is now "Viva Styles". She will have painted the view from on of these windows.

(Click on image to enlarge)

Leonora Kathleen Green and James Edmund Green [father?] shown

Electoral register Battersea 1930: 70, Battersea Rise [corner of Boutflower Rd?]Link.]

Electoral register Battersea 1934: 70, Battersea Rise: Link.]

Electoral register Reigate 1938, 1939: Fu-chi-Lodge, Parkgate Rd Link.]

A Margaret Leonora Kathleen Green appears in the National Probate Calendar in 1968 - Death date 4 Feb in Exeter leaving £1829. I suppose this could be her, but the date of death I have seen elsewhere is 1966.

[Source: Link.]

Incidentally, Ancestry often wrongly gives her address as Alberta Cottages or as Boutflower Rd.

LKG is mentioned in Elizabeth de Cacqueray, Painting the Second World War in Great Britain: A Selection of Women's Views:

To remain on the subject of food, stereotyped as feminine, it is interesting to look at a painting which, despite its early date, is close to the aesthetic known as hyperrealism, Leonora Green's Coupons Required (1941). The work is a still life, a genre which brings to the fore everyday objects, often food, and is variously used to remind the viewer of the transient nature of human existence, or of its opulent extravagance, or of the beauty of simple aspects of life and of nature. Thus Caravaggio, a founder of the genre, included in his Boy with a Basket of Fruit (c 1593) a withering leaf, a spot of corruption on the fruit while later painters would show off the wealth of the house, (Abraham van Beyren, 17th century Dutch) or the delicate bloom of an apple or an orange (Paul Cezanne 1895-1900).

The food in Coupons Required looks both appetising and copious, but for the fact that it is the rat (...) [ration etc ??]

28 Hyperrealism develops paintings which imitate photographic images emphasizing mundane everyday imag (...)

The still life painter foregrounds his/her particular concern: Leonora Green places the key to her work in the left-hand corner, "Your Ration Book." The painting then displays the precious components of an English person's everyday experience in wartime, the elements of her/his diet only obtainable thanks to ration coupons, and in limited quantity - meat, sugar, butter, jam, tea. The social context is closer to Cézanne's than to van Beyren's, but the silverware of the wealthy household, a favourite subject of classic still life, finds an echo in the shiny stainless steel tea-pot, pride of the table, even if the tea to put in it is in short supply. Leonora Green's painting is faithful to the genre, but adapts it with both severity and a touch of humour.27 The picture has a stark beauty and is closer to something one might find later, in the 1960s, than to the general run of 1930s painting thus anticipating the beginnings of hyperrealism.28

Leonora Green: Coupons Required, 1941: .

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The mathematician will interest himself mainly in the laws of perspective and their application, and even though there is no solution in paint of a complicated mathematical problem to compare with Mantegna's famous "Dead Christ" or the pulsating rhythm of Uccello's "Rout of San Romano" for him to admire, he would be well advised to examine carefully "Sir Charles Grant Robertson, C.V.O.", by Meredith Frampton, A.R.A., and "Coupons Required", by Leonora K. Green.

[Source: Link.]